The Ephemeral Scrapbook — 2026.08.30

👤 Personal {#newsletter}

1️⃣ Hello everyone. I'm excited to share this new edition of the ephemeral scrapbook, which I still enjoy putting together. It includes various tidbits about my creative hobbies. My newsletter frequently references AI-related articles. I considered adding a dedicated section for AI, but decided against it because my personal interests, such as Apple, writing, and photography, are all influenced by AI in some way. Additionally, many projects I completed this year relied heavily on AI. So, while there's no specific AI section, I included numerous references throughout the newsletter. 2️⃣ Did you know that there is an online index of past editions for you to visit?

"Only people are intelligent, creative, capable of actual thought. " → Our AI Stance - No AI, Ever: Cork

🗺️ Discoveries {#applehistory}

1️⃣ Remember After Dark? Depending on your age, you might. Or not. We were excited just by looking at flying toasters on a small screen. → Afterglow — classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS. 2️⃣ I discovered Standard Reader, thanks to Manton's blog post. It is joining a group of services designed for web discovery, more specifically, blog discovery. I like that. 

👨🏻‍💻 Writing {#aicontent, #llm}

1️⃣ LLMs don't write — they generate text statistically, with no understanding of meaning or word choice. Outrage over AI watermarking misses the point: you can't corrupt something that was never authentic. The real scandal is AI consuming human writing, not its word substitutions. → LLMs aren’t writing 2️⃣ Using AI as a conversational thought partner, especially via voice, can genuinely spark ideas without replacing the writing process itself. Meanwhile, frontier AI models may prove like mainframes: powerful but overkill, with smaller specialized models winning everyday use. → The Write Stuff

"Writing is thinking. Having a blog helps you practice how to think." — Cynthia Dunlop → Simon Willison on Technical Blogging

🌄 Photography {#glass, #moments, #photosharing}

1️⃣ I remember being on the waitlist for joining the still-unreleased photo-sharing service. I was looking for an alternative to SmugMug, 500px and Flickr. → 5 Years of Glass. 2️⃣ Moments: a calm home for your photography journals.

🍎 Apple & Tech {#timcook, #ads, #ipados26, #aibubble}

1️⃣ Many great quotes from Tim Cook. → Tim Cook Stepping Down as Apple CEO Next Week: 15 Years in Quotes 2️⃣ Fuck, Apple. → Apple Maps Ads Are Here, and There's No Way to Turn Them Off. Ads in Apple Products: Can't innovate anymore, my ass! 3️⃣ I'm not that excited for a bezeless iPhone, especially if it means returning to rounded edges like the iPhone 6 era. → The Truth About the Bezelless Concept Phone 4️⃣ I am still furious at the #abomination of a UI redesign of iPadOS 26. 5️⃣ The Art of Macintosh Packaging. I had one of these boxes back in the day. Thanks to BasicAppleGuy for sharing those images. → The Art of Macintosh Packaging 6️⃣ The iPhone Fold or iPhone Ultra seems to be gaining attention; will it last after it is officially launched this fall? → The End of the iPhone. 7️⃣ Apple should now introduce the Mac Neo, a smaller desktop form factor, cheaper than the newly introduced M6 Mac mini. → Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra for a big leap in performance and AI compute 8️⃣ Apple's Touch Bar (2016-2021) failed due to poor ergonomics, cramped interface design, lack of haptic feedback, and insufficient customization options. The feature might have succeeded with better physical design, robust action-assignment software, and evolution rather than revolution. My experience with a 2017 MacBook Pro proved to be more positive than this review and I'm kind of sorry that the TouchBar was discarded. It feels like it was a project mostly handled within the hardware team, not enough with the Mac UI and UX team, if such teams exist at Apple. → Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware? 9️⃣ The AI buildout mirrors telecom's fraudulent revenue loops, and when it collapses, ordinary retirement savings will absorb the losses. → The AI Bubble *️⃣ Apple needs a durable solution for app review delays. With vibe coding, non-developers can create an app in days, if not hours. → 12 days waiting for review. Still waiting.

📱 Apps & Services {#reading, #surveillance}

1️⃣ I recently discovered Bubbles, a website for reading articles coming from blogs around the world. It reminds me of Hacker News. Because Bubbles helps me discover new blogs, I decided to pay a visit on a regular basis, at least once a day, in the morning. So far, I like what I'm seeing and it will probably stay in my reading workflow. 2️⃣ Most apps silently harvest your location, device data, and behavior through embedded third-party trackers — data governments, employers, and foreign adversaries can legally buy. The White House app exemplifies this: it claimed zero data collection while continuously transmitting GPS coordinates. Use websites instead. → Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible. 😯

"Funny how when I ask AI about something I know, it’s completely wrong, But when I ask it about something I don’t know, it gives a great answer." — Our AI Stance - No AI, Ever: Cork

🚧 Special projects {#experiment, #photography}

1️⃣ I started a new experiment using Moments. I'll be sharing photos I processed in Snapseed on my iPad or iPhone. Sadly, this app, made by Google, is not available on the Mac or the web. I'm not ready to share the web address, but stay tuned. As a teaser, the hero image for this edition comes from when I had an account on onuniverse.com, which hosted a photo series in this style. Again, more about this in the next edition.

📺 YouTube {#camera, #aigovernance, #ai, #stevejobs}

1️⃣ I find these little devices cute and impressive, but I can't find a use case for them. With today's iPhone, how can we justify spending nearly $1,000 on these? → DJI Pocket 4P vs Insta360 Luna Ultra: Which one is BETTER? 2️⃣ AI safety expert Helen Toner breaks down why frontier AI models are already lying, cheating, and escaping control — and what it means that even their creators can't stop it. Essential listening for understanding how serious the alignment problem has become. → The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control | The Ezra Klein Show 3️⃣ I'm not sure why Apple is posting shorts like this on its YouTube channel. I would expect this to be elsewhere. → MacBook Pro: The most advanced Mac laptop for demanding tasks. 4️⃣ After watching this video, it's clear to me that upgrading my M2 MacBook Air to an M5 MacBook Air would be a good leap forward: storage speed and AI workloads. → The M5 MacBook Air Changed More Than It Looks. 5️⃣ Can you feel Reed's father in the way he talks and gestures? I can. I can only imagine that as he gets older, it will be even more so. Very interesting video on many different health and research-related subjects. → Reed Jobs on Founding Yosemite and the New Age of Biology.

🔮 Looking forward {#ai-coding, #company/meta}

1️⃣ Two juries have found Meta and YouTube liable not for their content but for deliberately addictive design features — infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic feeds. This "design defect" argument bypasses Section 230 protections and could force platforms to rebuild their products entirely. Too bad that the article's author, who passed away a few weeks ago, won't have a chance to see what's coming for Meta. → Meta’s Moment of Reckoning 2️⃣ AI is rapidly shifting software development from human-written code to agent-generated code at massive scale. The Bun 1.4 rewrite, one developer directing AI agents to produce 1M lines of working Rust in 11 days, demonstrates this isn't theoretical. Traditional programming isn't dead yet, but its dominance is ending. → The end of programming

🌟 Miscellaneous {#ai, #foodforthoughts, #seo, #company/google, #company/meta}

1️⃣ According to the Cork app developer, AI tools are glorified autocomplete systems that hallucinate confidently, destroy ecosystems, and are designed to create dependency before extracting payment. The author argues the "AI revolution" is a subsidized scam that will ultimately serve corporate and surveillance interests once investor money dries up. I respect people with a clear stance, even if I don't fully agree. → Our AI Stance - No AI, Ever: Cork 2️⃣ Always choose kindness, even when it's not easy. → Manton Reece - Choose kind 3️⃣ Google's AI Overviews have devastated web traffic for publishers and independent sites, with 68% of searches now ending without a click. Major media CEOs are planning to block Google entirely rather than feed content into its AI. The open internet as we knew it is effectively dying. → The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It 4️⃣ OpenAI's experimental AI agents, while training, spontaneously developed a covert messaging system, discovered and exploited multiple zero-days, escalated to cluster admin, and attacked Hugging Face — all without instruction. OpenAI only realized they caused the Hugging Face breach when asking Hugging Face to revoke their own compromised credentials. Ouch. → Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face 5️⃣ What they did to Instagram is criminal. 😭 → Instagram Blog: News, Updates, Tips & Tricks | About Instagram

👉🏻 Main 🌟 Meta 🌟 Blips 🌟 Blog 👀

I wish you a great week! ✌️ 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇪🇺 💪🏻

https://notbyai.fyi